Re: [Boost-docs] The beauty of LATEX

Subject: Re: [Boost-docs] The beauty of LATEX
From: Daniel James (dnljms_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-10-17 20:31:14

On 17 October 2011 06:35, Joel de Guzman <joel_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
> To be honest, I've been quite disappointed with DocBook and its
> ugly hack (tool chain) at generating PDF files.

O'Reilly use docbook for all of their books, although they might use
commercial software for generating the final book. I'm not sure. But
it is possible to get decent results from docbook. I've never spent
much time looking at pdf generation.

> Anyway, I guess if it still goes through the complex XSLT tool
> chain, I'll still have my doubts. Another way is to decouple
> the back-end of quickbook to allow it to directly generate
> HTML, or LaTeX in addition to Docbook. Quickbook started out
> generating HTML anyway and it should be reasonably doable to
> refactor the code, decoupling the output generation. The only
> problem I see is that some folks (e.g. John M), have written
> Quickbook templates that leverage more advanced features of
> DocBook. Those DocBook targetted templates obviously won't work
> with a different back-end. Me, I avoided writing such templates
> and going directly to DocBook because I didn't want to lose the
> possibility to have Quickbook retarget another back-end.

It's certainly doable, the spirit 2 fork of quickbook had a half
written html generator (it didn't do chunking and missed a few
features). The feedback wasn't particularly positive which is part of
the reason that it's the only feature I haven't ported back yet. The
implementation of the current quickbook is quite different though, the
spirit 2 version was very static, while the current version uses a
more dynamic data structure (along similar lines to utree), so it
isn't just a case of copying the implementation over. Generating latex
would be a bit trickier.

There is another problem, much of the current documentation based on
doxygen + quickbook make use of tags like 'funcref' and 'classref' to
link into the doxygen documentation, a replacement would need
something to support that. I haven't really thought about doing that
in quickbook, could possibly add some sort of anchor for language
reference types, would need to build in some sort of namespace
resolution, and maybe a way to identify the language type (could just
use the source mode?). I'm not sure if it'd be a good idea.